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Catherine Chatterley, PhDFounding Director, Canadian Institute for the Study of Antisemitism

Catherine Chatterley is the founding director of the Canadian Institute for the Study of Antisemitism (CISA) and research affiliate in the Department of History at the University of Manitoba. She trained as a cultural and intellectual historian at the University of Chicago. Under the supervision of leading scholars—Moishe Postone, Michael Geyer, Eric Santner, and Peter Novick—Chatterley specialized in modern Jewish history, modern German and central European history, with a particular focus on the Holocaust and Antisemitism. She has taught these subjects at the Universities of Manitoba and Winnipeg for the last ten years.

Her first book, based upon her doctoral dissertation, is entitled Disenchantment: George Steiner and the Meaning of Western Culture After Auschwitz, and is published by Syracuse University Press in their celebrated Religion, Theology, and the Holocaust Series (edited by Steven T. Katz).

For the last two years, Chatterley has held a prestigious Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Manitoba, which funded the research for a second book entitled A History of the Antisemitic Imagination. Upon completion of this fellowship in May 2011, the history department formally appointed her a Research Affiliate.

Catherine Chatterley was born and raised in Winnipeg and completed a B.A. in European History at the University of Manitoba, where she studied with Professor Lionel Steiman. Today, she teaches the course launched by him in 1987 (History of Antisemitism and the Holocaust) to a new generation of young students. Between Manitoba and Chicago, Catherine spent two years in Montreal in a Masters program at Concordia University under the guidance of Professor Frederick Krantz, who is also the Founding Director of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research (CIJR—publisher of Israfax and Isranet). There, she was a member of the Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies (MIGS), founded by Professors Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn.

In 2010, Chatterley established the Canadian Institute for the Study of Antisemitism (CISA), and recruited leading scholars to join its Academic Council and invited Professor Elie Wiesel to be its Honorary Chairman. The Institute is one of only six worldwide, the only one in Canada, and the only such institution founded and directed by a non-Jewish scholar. Last year, Chatterley was appointed vice president of the International
Association for the Study of Antisemitism (IASA). Along with Daniel Goldhagen and Charles Small, she will edit its new journal on the study of contemporary Antisemitism.

She is currently working on an interview series with leading scholars to evaluate the need to create a new academic field in Antisemitism Studies as well as the current condition of Holocaust Studies and whether the field will continue to exist given contemporary cultural and political pressures that lead to Holocaust obfuscation and minimization.